Eric Garner and Tamir Rice Are Missing from the FBI's Records of Police Killings

A number of high-profile deaths at the hands of police, including those of Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, are not included in the FBI's records, theGuardian reports. Their absence highlights the problems inherent in a system that allows local law enforcement agencies to choose whether or not to report data on the use of lethal force to the federal government.

There are 18,000 police and sheriff's departments in the United States, but just 224 of them reported that one or more of their officers had fatally shot someone in the last year. As the Guardian notes, not a single law enforcement agency in Florida, the nation's third most-populous state, reported an officer-involved homicide to the FBI, and the New York Police Department—the nation's largest—has not provided data since 2006.

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The FBI has 32 classifications for homicides, some of which are as specific as "child killed by babysitter," but it has just one that mentions officer-involved fatalities: "felon killed by police." That designation is automatically treated as a justifiable homicide, and excludes, well, everyone who's not a felon. As a result, many departments file incidents of officer use of lethal force against non-felons under general homicide and manslaughter metrics.

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Because the reporting program remains voluntary, an FBI spokesman told the Guardian, "We have no way of knowing how many incidents may have been omitted."

But the issues with how incidents are reported do not end there. The FBI lists only basic details about each event, details which do not include whether the subject in question was armed with a weapon—a cornerstone of the debate over police use of force. In addition, the Guardian found that details of some controversial deaths were entered haphazardly in the database, sometimes with incorrect demographic information, imperiling efforts to determine against whom lethal force is most often used.

The most confounding part of the report is that even high-profile names like Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and John Crawford are missing from the database. Garner, like any non-felon killed by the NYPD since 2006, was not reported at all. The Cleveland Police Department, whose officers fatally shot 12-year-old Rice, did not report that incident, while the Beavercreek, Ohio, police did not include Crawford, whom officers shot to death in a Walmart, among its data.

Despite efforts at the federal level, coordinated by Attorney General Loretta Lynch and FBI Director James Comey, to enhance data collection on the use of lethal force by local law enforcement, the profound shortcomings of the FBI report indicate the scale of the task at hand. As movements like Black Lives Matter seek justice and accountability in the wake of what they perceive to be the unjustifiable deaths of minorities at the hands of police, they face a daunting obstacle: They have no way of knowing, on a national level, where and how often it's happening.